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Modern Socialism is, in its essence, the direct product of the recognition, on the
one hand, of the class antagonisms existing in the society of today between proprietors
and non-proprietors, between capitalists and wage-workers; on the other hand, of the
anarchy existing in production. But, in its theoretical form, modern Socialism originally
appears ostensibly as a more logical extension of the principles laid down by the
great French philosophers of the 18th century. Like every new theory, modern Socialism
had, at first, to connect itself with the intellectual stock-in-trade ready to its
hand, however deeply its roots lay in material economic facts.

The great men, who in France prepared men's minds for the coming revolution, were
themselves extreme revolutionists. They recognized no external authority of any kind
whatever. Religion, natural science, society, political institutions — everything
was subjected to the most unsparing criticism: everything must justify its existence
before the judgment-seat of reason or give up existence. Reason became the sole measure
of everything. It was the time when, as Hegel says, the world stood upon its head
[1]; first in the sense that the human head, and the principles arrived at by its
thought, claimed to be the basis of all human action and association; but by and by,
also, in the wider sense that the reality which was in contradiction to these principles
had, in fact, to be turned upside down. Every form of society and government then
existing, every old traditional notion, was flung into the lumber-room as irrational;
the world had hitherto allowed itself to be led solely by prejudices; everything in
the past deserved only pity and contempt. Now, for the first time, appeared the light
of day, the kingdom of reason; henceforth superstition, injustice, privilege, oppression,
were to be superseded by eternal truth, eternal Right, equality based on Nature and
the inalienable rights of man.

We know today that this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the idealized kingdom
of the bourgeoisie; that this eternal Right found its realization in bourgeois justice;
that this equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality before the law; that bourgeois
property was proclaimed as one of the essential rights of man; and that the government
of reason, the Contrat Social of Rousseau, came into being, and only could come into
being, as a democratic bourgeois republic. The great thinkers of the 18th century
could, no more than their predecessors, go beyond the limits imposed upon them by
their epoch.

But, side by side with the antagonisms of the feudal nobility and the burghers, who
claimed to represent all the rest of society, was the general antagonism of exploiters
and exploited, of rich idlers and poor workers. It was this very circumstance that
made it possible for the representatives of the bourgeoisie to put themselves forward
as representing not one special class, but the whole of suffering humanity. Still
further. From its origin the bourgeoisie was saddled with its antithesis: capitalists
cannot exist without wage-workers, and, in the same proportion as the mediaeval burgher
of the guild developed into the modern bourgeois, the guild journeyman and the day-laborer,
outside the guilds, developed into the proletarian. And although, upon the whole,
the bourgeoisie, in their struggle with the nobility, could claim to represent at
the same time the interests of the different working-classes of that period, yet in
every great bourgeois movement there were independent outbursts of that class which
was the forerunner, more or less developed, of the modern proletariat. For example,
at the time of the German Reformation and the Peasants' War, the Anabaptists and Thomas
Munzer; in the great English Revolution, the Levellers; in the great French Revolution,
Babeuf.

These were theoretical enunciations, corresponding with these revolutionary uprisings
of a class not yet developed; in the 16th and 17th centuries, Utopian pictures of
ideal social conditions 2); in the 18th century, actual communistic theories (Morelly
and Mably). The demand for equality was no longer limited to political rights; it
was extended also to the social conditions of individuals. It was not simply class
privileges that were to be abolished, but class distinctions themselves. A Communism,
ascetic, denouncing all the pleasures of life, Spartan, was the first form of the
new teaching. Then came the three great Utopians: Saint-Simon, to whom the middle-class
movement, side by side with the proletarian, still had a certain significance; Fourier
and Owen, who in the country where capitalist production was most developed, and under
the influence of the antagonisms begotten of this, worked out his proposals for the
removal of class distinction systematically and in direct relation to French materialism.

One thing is common to all three. Not one of them appears as a representative of the
interests of that proletariat which historical development had, in the meantime, produced.
Like the French philosophers, they do not claim to emancipate a particular class to
begin with, but all humanity at once. Like them, they wish to bring in the kingdom
of reason and eternal justice, but this kingdom, as they see it, is as far as Heaven
from Earth, from that of the French philosophers.

For, to our three social reformers, the bourgeois world, based upon the principles
of these philosophers, is quite as irrational and unjust, and, therefore, finds its
way to the dust-hole quite as readily as feudalism and all the earlier stages of society.
If pure reason and justice have not, hitherto, ruled the world, this has been the
case only because men have not rightly understood them. What was wanted was the individual
man of genius, who has now arisen and who understands the truth. That he has now arisen,
that the truth has now been clearly understood, is not an inevitable event, following
of necessity in the chains of historical development, but a mere happy accident. He
might just as well have been born 500 years earlier, and might then have spared humanity
500 years of error, strife, and suffering.

We saw how the French philosophers of the 18th century, the forerunners of the Revolution,
appealed to reason as the sole judge of all that is. A rational government, rational
society, were to be founded; everything that ran counter to eternal reasons was to
be remorselessly done away with. We saw also that this eternal reason was in reality
nothing but the idealized understand of the 18th century citizen, just then evolving
into the bourgeois. The French Revolution had realized this rational society and government.

But the new order of things, rational enough as compared with earlier conditions,
turned out to be by no means absolutely rational. The state based upon reason completely
collapsed. Rousseau's Contrat Social had found its realization in the Reign of Terror,
from which the bourgeoisie, who had lost confidence in their own political capacity,
had taken refuge first in the corruption of the Directorate, and, finally, under the
wing of the Napoleonic despotism. The promised eternal peace was turned into an endless
war of conquest. The society based upon reason had fared no better. The antagonism
between rich and poor, instead of dissolving into general prosperity, had become intensified
by the removal of the guild and other privileges, which had to some extent bridged
it over, and by the removal of the charitable institutions of the Church. The "freedom
of property" from feudal fetters, now veritably accomplished, turned out to be, for
the small capitalists and small proprietors, the freedom to sell their small property,
crushed under the overmastering competition of the large capitalists and landlords,
to these great lords, and thus, as far as the small capitalists and peasant proprietors
were concerned, became "freedom from property". The development of industry upon a
capitalistic basis made poverty and misery of the working masses conditions of existence
of society. Cash payment became more and more, in Carlyle's phrase, the sole nexus
between man and man. The number of crimes increased from year to year. Formerly, the
feudal vices had openly stalked about in broad daylight; though not eradicated, they
were now at any rate thrust into the background. In their stead, the bourgeois vices,
hitherto practiced in secret, began to blossom all the more luxuriantly. Trade became
to a greater and greater extent cheating. The "fraternity" of the revolutionary motto
was realized in the chicanery and rivalries of the battle of competition. Oppression
by force was replaced by corruption; the sword, as the first social lever, by gold.
The right of the first night was transferred from the feudal lords to the bourgeois
manufacturers. Prostitution increased to an extent never head of. Marriage itself
remained, as before, the legally recognized form, the official cloak of prostitution,
and, moreover, was supplemented by rich crops of adultery.

In a word, compared with the splendid promises of the philosophers, the social and
political institutions born of the "triumph of reason" were bitterly disappointing
caricatures. All that was wanting was the men to formulate this disappointment, and
they came with the turn of the century. In 1802, Saint-Simon's Geneva letters appeared;
in 1808 appeared Fourier's first work, although the groundwork of his theory dated
from 1799; on January 1, 1800, Robert Owen undertook the direction of New Lanark.

At this time, however, the capitalist mode of production, and with it the antagonism
between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, was still very incompletely developed.
Modern Industry, which had just arisen in England, was still unknown in France. But
Modern Industry develops, on the one hand, the conflicts which make absolutely necessary
a revolution in the mode of production, and the doing away with its capitalistic character
— conflicts not only between the classes begotten of it, but also between the very
productive forces and the forms of exchange created by it. And, on the other hand,
it develops, in these very gigantic productive forces, the means of ending these conflicts.
If, therefore, about the year 1800, the conflicts arising from the new social order
were only just beginning to take shape, this holds still more fully as to the means
of ending them. The "have-nothing" masses of Paris, during the Reign of Terror, were
able for a moment to gain the mastery, and thus to lead the bourgeois revolution to
victory in spite of the bourgeoisie themselves. But, in doing so, they only proved
how impossible it was for their domination to last under the conditions then obtaining.
The proletariat, which then for the first time evolved itself from these "have-nothing"
masses as the nucleus of a new class, as yet quite incapable of independent political
action, appeared as an oppressed, suffering order, to whom, in its incapacity to help
itself, help could, at best, be brought in from without or down from above.

This historical situation also dominated the founders of Socialism. To the crude conditions
of capitalistic production and the crude class conditions correspond crude theories.
The solution of the social problems, which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic
conditions, the Utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain. Society presented
nothing but wrongs; to remove these was the task of reason. It was necessary, then,
to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon
society from without by propaganda, and, wherever it was possible, by the example
of model experiments. These new social systems were foredoomed as Utopian; the more
completely they were worked out in detail, the more they could not avoid drifting
off into pure phantasies.

These facts once established, we need not dwell a moment longer upon this side of
the question, now wholly belonging to the past. We can leave it to the literary small
fry to solemnly quibble over these phantasies, which today only make us smile, and
to crow over the superiority of their own bald reasoning, as compared with such "insanity".
For ourselves, we delight in the stupendously grand thoughts and germs of thought
that everywhere break out through their phantastic covering, and to which these Philistines
are blind.

Saint-Simon was a son of the great French Revolution, at the outbreak of which he
was not yet 30. The Revolution was the victory of the 3rd estate — i.e., of the great
masses of the nation, working in production and in trade, over the privileged idle
classes, the nobles and the priests. But the victory of the 3rd estate soon revealed
itself as exclusively the victory of a smaller part of this "estate", as the conquest
of political power by the socially privileged section of it — i.e., the propertied
bourgeoisie. And the bourgeoisie had certainly developed rapidly during the Revolution,
partly by speculation in the lands of the nobility and of the Church, confiscated
and afterwards put up for sale, and partly by frauds upon the nation by means of army
contracts. It was the domination of these swindlers that, under the Directorate, brought
France to the verge of ruin, and thus gave Napoleon the pretext for his coup d'etat.

Hence, to Saint-Simon the antagonism between the 3rd Estate and the privileged classes
took the form of an antagonism between "workers" and "idlers". The idlers were not
merely the old privileged classes, but also all who, without taking any part in production
or distribution, lived on their incomes. And the workers were not only the wage-workers,
but also the manufacturers, the merchants, the bankers. That the idlers had lost the
capacity for intellectual leadership and political supremacy had been proved, and
was by the Revolution finally settled. That the non-possessing classes had not this
capacity seemed to Saint-Simon proved by the experiences of the Reign of Terror. Then,
who was to lead and command? According to Saint-Simon, science and industry, both
united by a new religious bond, destined to restore that unity of religious ideas
which had been lost since the time of the Reformation — a necessarily mystic and rigidly
hierarchic "new Christianity". But science, that was the scholars; and industry, that
was, in the first place, the working bourgeois, manufacturers, merchants, bankers.
These bourgeois were, certainly, intended by Saint-Simon to transform themselves into
a kind of public officials, of social trustees; but they were still to hold, vis-a-vis
of the workers, a commanding and economically privileged position. The bankers especially
were to be called upon to direct the whole of social production by the regulation
of credit. This conception was in exact keeping with a time in which Modern Industry
in France and, with it, the chasm between bourgeoisie and proletariat was only just
coming into existence. But what Saint-Simon especially lays stress upon is this: what
interests him first, and above all other things, is the lot of the class that is the
most numerous and the most poor ("la classe la plus nombreuse et la plus pauvre").

Already in his Geneva letters, Saint-Simon lays down the proposition that "all men
ought to work". In the same work he recognizes also that the Reign of Terror was the
reign of the non-possessing masses.

"See," says he to them, "what happened in France at the time when your comrades held
sway there; they brought about a famine."

But to recognize the French Revolution as a class war, and not simply one between
nobility and bourgeoisie, but between nobility, bourgeoisie, and the non-possessors,
was, in the year 1802, a most pregnant discovery. In 1816, he declares that politics
is the science of production, and foretells the complete absorption of politics by
economics. The knowledge that economic conditions are the basis of political institutions
appears here only in embryo. Yet what is here already very plainly expressed is the
idea of the future conversion of political rule over men into an administration of
things and a direction of processes of production — that is to say, the "abolition
of the state", about which recently there has been so much noise.

Saint-Simon shows the same superiority over his contemporaries, when in 1814, immediately
after the entry of the allies into Paris, and again in 1815, during the Hundred Days'
War, he proclaims the alliance of France and England, and then of both of these countries,
with Germany, as the only guarantee for the prosperous development and peace of Europe.
To preach to the French in 1815 an alliance with the victors of Waterloo required
as much courage as historical foresight.

If in Saint-Simon we find a comprehensive breadth of view, by virtue of which almost
all the ideas of later Socialists that are not strictly economic are found in him
in embryo, we find in Fourier a criticism of the existing conditions of society, genuinely
French and witty, but not upon that account any the less thorough. Fourier takes the
bourgeoisie, their inspired prophets before the Revolution, and their interested eulogists
after it, at their own word. He lays bare remorselessly the material and moral misery
of the bourgeois world. He confronts it with the earlier philosophers' dazzling promises
of a society in which reason alone should reign, of a civilization in which happiness
should be universal, of an illimitable human perfectibility, and with the rose-colored
phraseology of the bourgeois ideologists of his time. He points out how everywhere
the most pitiful reality corresponds with the most high-sounding phrases, and he overwhelms
this hopeless fiasco of phrases with his mordant sarcasm.

Fourier is not only a critic, his imperturbably serene nature makes him a satirist,
and assuredly one of the greatest satirists of all time. He depicts, with equal power
and charm, the swindling speculations that blossomed out upon the downfall of the
Revolution, and the shopkeeping spirit prevalent in, and characteristic of, French
commerce at that time. Still more masterly is his criticism of the bourgeois form
of the relations between sexes, and the position of woman in bourgeois society. He
was the first to declare that in any given society the degree of woman's emancipation
is the natural measure of the general emancipation.

But Fourier is at his greatest in his conception of the history of society. He divides
its whole course, thus far, into four stages of evolution — savagery, barbarism, the
patriarchate, civilization. This last is identical with the so-called civil, or bourgeois,
society of today — i.e., with the social order that came in with the 16th century.
He proves "that the civilized stage raises every vice practiced by barbarism in a
simple fashion into a form of existence, complex, ambiguous, equivocal, hypocritical"
— that civilization moves "in a vicious circle", in contradictions which it constantly
reproduces without being able to solve them; hence it constantly arrives at the very
opposite to that which it wants to attain, or pretends to want to attain, so that,
e.g., "under civilization poverty is born of superabundance itself".

Fourier, as we see, uses the dialectic method in the same masterly way as his contemporary,
Hegel. Using these same dialectics, he argues against talk about illimitable human
perfectibility, that every historical phase has its period of ascent and also its
period of descent, and he applies this observation to the future of the whole human
race. As Kant introduced into natural science the idea of the ultimate destruction
of the Earth, Fourier introduced into historical science that of the ultimate destruction
of the human race.

Whilst in France the hurricane of the Revolution swept over the land, in England a
quieter, but not on that account less tremendous, revolution was going on. Steam and
the new tool-making machinery were transforming manufacture into modern industry,
and thus revolutionizing the whole foundation of bourgeois society. The sluggish march
of development of the manufacturing period changed into a veritable storm and stress
period of production. With constantly increasing swiftness the splitting-up into large
capitalists and non-possessing proletarians went on. Between these, instead of the
former stable middle-class, an unstable mass of artisans and small shopkeepers, the
most fluctuating portion of the population, now led a precarious existence.

The new mode of production was, as yet, only at the beginning of its period of ascent;
as yet it was the normal, regular method of production — the only one possible under
existing conditions. Nevertheless, even then it was producing crying social abuses
— the herding together of a homeless population in the worst quarters of the large
towns; the loosening of all traditional moral bonds, of patriarchal subordination,
of family relations; overwork, especially of women and children, to a frightful extent;
complete demoralization of the working-class, suddenly flung into altogether new conditions,
from the country into the town, from agriculture into modern industry, from stable
conditions of existence into insecure ones that change from day to day.

At this juncture, there came forward as a reformer a manufacturer 29-years-old — a
man of almost sublime, childlike simplicity of character, and at the same time one
of the few born leaders of men. Robert Owen had adopted the teaching of the materialistic
philosophers: that man's character is the product, on the one hand, of heredity; on
the other, of the environment of the individual during his lifetime, and especially
during his period of development. In the industrial revolution most of his class saw
only chaos and confusion, and the opportunity of fishing in these troubled waters
and making large fortunes quickly. He saw in it the opportunity of putting into practice
his favorite theory, and so of bringing order out of chaos. He had already tried it
with success, as superintendent of more than 500 men in a Manchester factory. From
1800 to 1829, he directed the great cotton mill at New Lanark, in Scotland, as managing
partner, along the same lines, but with greater freedom of action and with a success
that made him a European reputation. A population, originally consisting of the most
diverse and, for the most part, very demoralized elements, a population that gradually
grew to 2,500, he turned into a model colony, in which drunkenness, police, magistrates,
lawsuits, poor laws, charity, were unknown. And all this simply by placing the people
in conditions worthy of human beings, and especially by carefully bringing up the
rising generation. He was the founder of infant schools, and introduced them first
at New Lanark. At the age of two, the children came to school, where they enjoyed
themselves so much that they could scarely be got home again. Whilst his competitors
worked their people 13 or 14 hours a day, in New Lanark the working-day was only 10
and a half hours. When a crisis in cotton stopped work for four months, his workers
received their full wages all the time. And with all this the business more than doubled
in value, and to the last yielded large profits to its proprietors.

In spite of all this, Owen was not content. The existence which he secured for his
workers was, in his eyes, still far from being worthy of human beings. "The people
were slaves at my mercy." The relatively favorable conditions in which he had placed
them were still far from allowing a rational development of the character and of the
intellect in all directions, much less of the free exercise of all their faculties.

"And yet, the working part of this population of 2,500 persons was daily producing
as much real wealth for society as, less than half a century before, it would have
required the working part of a population of 600,000 to create. I asked myself, what
became of the difference between the wealth consumed by 2,500 persons and that which
would have been consumed by 600,000?" [3]

The answer was clear. It had been used to pay the proprietors of the establishment
5 per cent on the capital they had laid out, in addition to over 300,000 pounds clear
profit. And that which held for New Lanark held to a still greater extent for all
the factories in England.

"If this new wealth had not been created by machinery, imperfectly as it has been
applied, the wars of Europe, in opposition to Napoleon, and to support the aristocratic
principles of society, could not have been maintained. And yet this new power was
the creation of the working-classes."

Note, l. c., p.22.

To them, therefore, the fruits of this new power belonged. The newly-created gigantic
productive forces, hitherto used only to enrich individuals and to enslave the masses,
offered to Owen the foundations for a reconstruction of society; they were destined,
as the common property of all, to be worked for the common good of all.

Owen's communism was based upon this purely business foundation, the outcome, so to
say, of commercial calculation. Throughout, it maintained this practical character.
Thus, in 1823, Owen proposed the relief of the distress in Ireland by Communist colonies,
and drew up complete estimates of costs of founding them, yearly expenditure, and
probably revenue. And in his definite plan for the future, the technical working out
of details is managed with such practical knowledge — ground plan, front and side
and bird's-eye views all included — that the Owen method of social reform once accepted,
there is from the practical point of view little to be said against the actual arrangement
of details.

His advance in the direction of Communism was the turning-point in Owen's life. As
long as he was simply a philanthropist, he was rewarded with nothing but wealth, applause,
honor, and glory. He was the most popular man in Europe. Not only men of his own class,
but statesmen and prince listened to him approvingly. But when he came out with his
Communist theories that was quite another thing. Three great obstacles seemed to him
especially to block the path to social reform: private property, religion, the present
form of marriage.

He knew what confronted him if he attacked these — outlawry, excommunication from
official society, the loss of his whole social position. But nothing of this prevented
him from attacking them without fear of consequences, and what he had foreseen happened.
Banished from official society, with a conspiracy of silence against him in the press,
ruined by his unsuccessful Communist experiments in America, in which he sacrificed
all his fortune, he turned directly to the working-class and continued working in
their midst for 30 years. Every social movement, every real advance in England on
behalf of the workers links itself on to the name of Robert Owen. He forced through
in 1819, after five years' fighting, the first law limiting the hours of labor of
women and children in factories. He was president of the first Congress at which all
the Trade Unions of England united in a single great trade association. He introduced
as transition measures to the complete communistic organization of society, on the
one hand, cooperative societies for retail trade and production. These have since
that time, at least, given practical proof that the merchant and the manufacturer
are socially quite unnecessary. On the other hand, he introduced labor bazaars for
the exchange of the products of labor through the medium of labor-notes, whose unit
was a single hour of work; institutions necessarily doomed to failure, but completely
anticipating Proudhon's bank of exchange of a much later period, and differing entirely
from this in that it did not claim to be the panacea for all social ills, but only
a first step towards a much more radical revolution of society.

The Utopians' mode of thought has for a long time governed the Socialist ideas of
the 19th century, and still governs some of them. Until very recently, all French
and English Socialists did homage to it. The earlier German Communism, including that
of Weitling, was of the same school. To all these, Socialism is the expression of
absolute truth, reason and justice, and has only to be discovered to conquer all the
world by virtue of its own power. And as an absolute truth is independent of time,
space, and of the historical development of man, it is a mere accident when and where
it is discovered. With all this, absolute truth, reason, and justice are different
with the founder of each different school. And as each one's special kind of absolute
truth, reason, and justice is again conditioned by his subjective understanding, his
conditions of existence, the measure of his knowledge and his intellectual training,
there is no other ending possible in this conflict of absolute truths than that they
shall be mutually exclusive of one another. Hence, from this nothing could come but
a kind of eclectic, average Socialism, which, as a matter of fact, has up to the present
time dominated the minds of most of the socialist workers in France and England. Hence,
a mish-mash allowing of the most manifold shades of opinion: a mish-mash of such critical
statements, economic theories, pictures of future society by the founders of different
sects, as excite a minimum of opposition; a mish-mash which is the more easily brewed
the more definite sharp edges of the individual constituents are rubbed down in the
stream of debate, like rounded pebbles in a brook.

To make a science of Socialism, it had first to be placed upon a real basis.

Notes

[1] This is the passage of the French Revolution:

"Thought, the concept of law, all at once made itself felt, and against this the old
scaffolding of wrong could make no stand. In this conception of law, therefore, a
constitution has now been established, and henceforth everything must be cased upon
this. Since the Sun had been in the firmament, and the planets circled around him,
the sight had never been seen of man standing upon his head — i.e., on the Idea —
and building reality after this image. Anaxagoras first said that the Nous, reason,
rules the world; but now, for the first time, had men come to recognize that the Idea
must rule the mental reality. And this was a magnificent sunrise. All thinking Beings
have participated in celebrating this holy day. A sublime emotion swayed men at that
time, an enthusiasm of reason pervaded the world, as if now had come the reconciliation
of the Divine Principle with the world." [Hegel: "The Philosophy of history", 1840,
p.535]

Is it not high time to set the anti-Socialist law in action against such teachings,
subversive and to the common danger, by the late Professor Hegel?

(2 Engels refers here to the works of the utopian Socialists Thomas More (16th century)
and Tommaso Campanella (17th century).

[3] From The Revolution in Mind and Practice, p.21, a memorial addressed to all the
"red Republicans, Communists and Socialists of Europe", and sent to the provisional
government of France, 1848, and also "to Queen Victoria and her responsible advisers."

In the meantime, along with and after the French philosophy of the 18th century, had
arisen the new German philosophy, culminating in Hegel.

Its greatest merit was the taking up again of dialectics as the highest form of reasoning.
The old Greek philosophers were all born natural dialecticians, and Aristotle, the
most encyclopaedic of them, had already analyzed the most essential forms of dialectic
thought. The newer philosophy, on the other hand, although in it also dialectics had
brilliant exponents (e.g. Descartes and Spinoza), had, especially through English
influence, become more and more rigidly fixed in the so-called metaphysical mode of
reasoning, by which also the French of the 18th century were almost wholly dominated,
at all events in their special philosophical work. Outside philosophy in the restricted
sense, the French nevertheless produced masterpieces of dialectic. We need only call
to mind Diderot's Le Neveu de Rameau, and Rousseau's Discours sur l'origine et les
fondements de l'inegalite parmi less hommes. We give here, in brief, the essential
character of these two modes of thought.

When we consider and reflect upon Nature at large, or the history of mankind, or our
own intellectual activity, at first we see the picture of an endless entanglement
of relations and reactions, permutations and combinations, in which nothing remains
what, where and as it was, but everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes
away. We see, therefore, at first the picture as a whole, with its individual parts
still more or less kept in the background; we observe the movements, transitions,
connections, rather than the things that move, combine, and are connected. This primitive,
naive but intrinsically correct conception of the world is that of ancient Greek philosophy,
and was first clearly formulated by Heraclitus: everything is and is not, for everything
is fluid, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away.[A]

But this conception, correctly as it expresses the general character of the picture
of appearances as a whole, does not suffice to explain the details of which this picture
is made up, and so long as we do not understand these, we have not a clear idea of
the whole picture. In order to understand these details, we must detach them from
their natural, special causes, effects, etc. This is, primarily, the task of natural
science and historical research: branches of science which the Greek of classical
times, on very good grounds, relegated to a subordinate position, because they had
first of all to collect materials for these sciences to work upon. A certain amount
of natural and historical material must be collected before there can be any critical
analysis, comparison, and arrangement in classes, orders, and species. The foundations
of the exact natural sciences were, therefore, first worked out by the Greeks of the
Alexandrian period [B], and later on, in the Middle Ages, by the Arabs. Real natural
science dates from the second half of the 15th century, and thence onward it had advanced
with constantly increasing rapidity. The analysis of Nature into its individual parts,
the grouping of the different natural processes and objects in definite classes, the
study of the internal anatomy of organized bodies in their manifold forms — these
were the fundamental conditions of the gigantic strides in our knowledge of Nature
that have been made during the last 400 years. But this method of work has also left
us as legacy the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart
from their connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in motion;
as constraints, not as essentially variables; in their death, not in their life. And
when this way of looking at things was transferred by Bacon and Locke from natural
science to philosophy, it begot the narrow, metaphysical mode of thought peculiar
to the last century.

To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to
be be considered one after the other and apart from each other, are objects of investigation
fixed, rigid, given once for all. He thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses.
His communication is 'yea, yea; nay, nay'; for whatsoever is more than these cometh
of evil." For him, a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the
same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude on
another; cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis, one to the other.

At first sight, this mode of thinking seems to us very luminous, because it is that
of so-called sound commonsense. Only sound commonsense, respectable fellow that he
is, in the homely realm of his own four walls, has very wonderful adventures directly
he ventures out into the wide world of research. And the metaphysical mode of thought,
justifiable and necessary as it is in a number of domains whose extent varies according
to the nature of the particular object of investigation, sooner or later reaches a
limit, beyond which it becomes one-sided, restricted, abstract, lost in insoluble
contradictions. In the contemplation of individual things, it forgets the connection
between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets the beginning and
end of that existence; of their repose, if forgets their motion. It cannot see the
woods for the trees.

For everyday purposes, we know and can say, e.g., whether an animal is alive or not.
But, upon closer inquiry, we find that his is, in many cases, a very complex question,
as the jurists know very well. They have cudgelled their brains in vain to discover
a rational limit beyond which the killing of the child in its mother's womb is murder.
It is just as impossible to determine absolutely the moment of death, for physiology
proves that death is not an instantaneous, momentary phenomenon, but a very protracted
process.

In like manner, every organized being is every moment the same and not the same; every
moment, it assimilates matter supplied from without, and gets rid of other matter;
every moment, some cells of its body die and others build themselves anew; in a longer
or shorter time, the matter of its body is completely renewed, and is replaced by
other molecules of matter, so that every organized being is always itself, and yet
something other than itself.

Further, we find upon closer investigation that the two poles of an antithesis, positive
and negative, e.g., are as inseparable as they are opposed, and that despite all their
opposition, they mutually interpenetrate. And we find, in like manner, that cause
and effect are conceptions which only hold good in their application to individual
cases; but as soon as we consider the individual cases in their general connection
with the universe as a whole, they run into each other, and they become confounded
when we contemplate that universal action and reaction in which causes and effects
are eternally changing places, so that what is effect here and now will be cause there
and then, and vice versa.

None of these processes and modes of thought enters into the framework of metaphysical
reasoning. Dialectics, on the other hand, comprehends things and their representations,
ideas, in their essential connection, concatenation, motion, origin and ending. Such
processes as those mentioned above are, therefore, so many corroborations of its own
method of procedure.

Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern science that it
has furnished this proof with very rich materials increasingly daily, and thus has
shown that, in the last resort, Nature works dialectically and not metaphysically;
that she does not move in the eternal oneness of a perpetually recurring circle, but
goes through a real historical evolution. In this connection, Darwin must be named
before all others. He dealt the metaphysical conception of Nature the heaviest blow
by his proof that all organic beings, plants, animals, and man himself, are the products
of a process of evolution going on through millions of years. But, the naturalists,
who have learned to think dialectically, are few and far between, and this conflict
of the results of discovery with preconceived modes of thinking, explains the endless
confusion now reigning in theoretical natural science, the despair of teachers as
well as learners, of authors and readers alike.

An exact representation of the universe, of its evolution, of the development of mankind,
and of the reflection of this evolution in the minds of men, can therefore only be
obtained by the methods of dialectics with its constant regard to the innumerable
actions and reactions of life and death, of progressive or retrogressive changes.
And in this spirit, the new German philosophy has worked. Kant began his career by
resolving the stable Solar system of Newton and its eternal duration, after the famous
initial impulse had once been given, into the result of a historical process, the
formation of the Sun and all the planets out of a rotating, nebulous mass. From this,
he at the same time drew the conclusion that, given this origin of the Solar system,
its future death followed of necessity. His theory, half a century later, was established
mathematically by Laplace, and half a century after that, the spectroscope proved
the existence in space of such incandescent masses of gas in various stages of condensation.

This new German philosophy culminated in the Hegelian system. In this system — and
herein is its great merit — for the first time the whole world, natural, historical,
intellectual, is represented as a process — i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation,
development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes
a continuous whole of all this movement and development. From this point of view,
the history of mankind no longer appeared as a wild whirl of senseless deeds of violence,
all equally condemnable at the judgment seat of mature philosophic reason and which
are best forgotten as quickly as possible, but as the process of evolution of man
himself. It was now the task of the intellect to follow the gradual march of this
process through all its devious ways, and to trace out the inner law running through
all its apparently accidental phenomena.

That the Hegelian system did not solve the problem it propounded is here immaterial.
Its epoch-making merit was that it propounded the problem. This problem is one that
no single individual will ever be able to solve. Although Hegel was — with Saint-Simon
— the most encyclopaedic mind of his time, yet he was limited, first, by the necessary
limited extent of his own knowledge and, second, by the limited extent and depth of
the knowledge and conceptions of his age. to these limits, a third must be added.
Hegel was an idealist. To him, the thoughts within his brain were not the more or
less abstract pictures of actual things and processes, but, conversely, things and
their evolution were only the realized pictures of the "Idea", existing somewhere
from eternity before the world was. This way of thinking turned everything upside
down, and completely reversed the actual connection of things in the world. Correctly
and ingeniously as many groups of facts were grasped by Hegel, yet, for the reasons
just given, there is much that is botched, artificial, labored, in a word, wrong in
point of detail. The Hegelian system, in itself, was a colossal miscarriage — but
it was also the last of its kind.

It was suffering, in fact, from an internal and incurable contradiction. Upon the
one hand, its essential proposition was the conception that human history is a process
of evolution, which, by its very nature, cannot find its intellectual final term in
the discovery of any so-called absolute truth. But, on the other hand, it laid claim
to being the very essence of this absolute truth. A system of natural and historical
knowledge, embracing everything, and final for all time, is a contradiction to the
fundamental law of dialectic reasoning.

This law, indeed, by no means excludes, but, on the contrary, includes the idea that
the systematic knowledge of the external universe can make giant strides from age
to age.

The perception of the the fundamental contradiction in German idealism led necessarily
back to materialism, but — nota bene — not to the simply metaphysical, exclusively
mechanical materialism of the 18th century. Old materialism looked upon all previous
history as a crude heap of irrationality and violence; modern materialism sees in
it the process of evolution of humanity, and aims at discovering the laws thereof.
With the French of the 18th century, and even with Hegel, the conception obtained
of Nature as a whole — moving in narrow circles, and forever immutable, with its eternal
celestial bodies, as Newton, and unalterable organic species, as Linnaeus, taught.
Modern materialism embraces the more recent discoveries of natural science, according
to which Nature also has its history in time, the celestial bodies, like the organic
species that, under favorable conditions, people them, being born and perishing. And
even if Nature, as a whole, must still be said to move in recurrent cycles, these
cycles assume infinitely larger dimensions. In both aspects, modern materialism is
essentially dialectic, and no longer requires the assistance of that sort of philosophy
which, queen-like, pretended to rule the remaining mob of sciences. As soon as each
special science is bound to make clear its position in the great totality of things
and of our knowledge of things, a special science dealing with this totality is superfluous
or unnecessary. That which still survives of all earlier philosophy is the science
of thought and its law — formal logic and dialectics. Everything else is subsumed
in the positive science of Nature and history.

Whilst, however, the revolution in the conception of Nature could only be made in
proportion to the corresponding positive materials furnished by research,already much
earlier certain historical facts had occurred which led to a decisive change in the
conception of history. In 1831, the first working-class rising took place in Lyons;
between 1838 and 1842, the first national working-class movement, that of the English
Chartists, reached its height. The class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie
came to the front in the history of the most advanced countries in Europe, in proportion
to the development, upon the one hand, of modern industry, upon the other, of the
newly-acquired political supremacy of the bourgeoisie. facts more and more strenuously
gave the lie to the teachings of bourgeois economy as to the identity of the interests
of capital and labor, as to the universal harmony and universal prosperity that would
be the consequence of unbridled competition. All these things could no longer be ignored,
any more than the French and English Socialism, which was their theoretical, though
very imperfect, expression. But the old idealist conception of history, which was
not yet dislodged, knew nothing of class struggles based upon economic interests,
knew nothing of economic interests; production and all economic relations appeared
in it only as incidental, subordinate elements in the "history of civilization".

The new facts made imperative a new examination of all past history. Then it was seen
that all past history, with the exception of its primitive stages, was the history
of class struggles; that these warring classes of society are always the products
of the modes of production and of exchange — in a word, of the economic conditions
of their time; that the economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis,
starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure
of juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical,
and other ideas of a given historical period. Hegel has freed history from metaphysics
— he made it dialectic; but his conception of history was essentially idealistic.
But now idealism was driven from its last refuge, the philosophy of history; now a
materialistic treatment of history was propounded, and a method found of explaining
man's "knowing" by his "being", instead of, as heretofore, his "being" by his "knowing".

From that time forward, Socialism was no longer an accidental discovery of this or
that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the struggle between two historically
developed classes — the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Its task was no longer to
manufacture a system of society as perfect as possible, but to examine the historico-economic
succession of events from which these classes and their antagonism had of necessity
sprung, and to discover in the economic conditions thus created the means of ending
the conflict. But the Socialism of earlier days was as incompatible with this materialist
conception as the conception of Nature of the French materialists was with dialectics
and modern natural science. The Socialism of earlier days certainly criticized the
existing capitalistic mode of production and its consequences. But it could not explain
them, and, therefore, could not get the mastery of them. It could only simply reject
them as bad. The more strongly this earlier Socialism denounced the exploitations
of the working-class, inevitable under Capitalism, the less able was it clearly to
show in what this exploitation consisted and how it arose. but for this it was necessary
—

to present the capitalistic mode of production in its historical connection and its
inevitableness during a particular historical period, and therefore, also, to present
its inevitable downfall; and

to lay bare its essential character, which was still a secret. This was done by the
discovery of surplus-value.

It was shown that the appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of the capitalist
mode of production and of the exploitation of the worker that occurs under it; that
even if the capitalist buys the labor power of his laborer at its full value as a
commodity on the market, he yet extracts more value from it than he paid for; and
that in the ultimate analysis, this surplus-value forms those sums of value from which
are heaped up constantly increasing masses of capital in the hands of the possessing
classes. The genesis of capitalist production and the production of capital were both
explained.

These two great discoveries, the materialistic conception of history and the revelation
of the secret of capitalistic production through surplus-value, we owe to Marx. With
these discoveries, Socialism became a science. The next thing was to work out all
its details and relations.

Notes

[A] Unknown to the Western world until the 20th-century, the Chinese philosopher Lao
Tzu was a predecessor of or possibly contemporary to Heraclitus. Lao Tzu wrote the
renowned Tao Te Ching in which he also espouses the fundamental principles of dialectics.

[B] The Alexandrian period of the development of science comprises the period extending
from the 3rd century B.C. to the 17th century A.D. It derives its name from the town
of Alexandria in Egypt, which was one of the most important centres of international
economic intercourses at that time. In the Alexandrian period, mathematics (Euclid
and Archimedes), geography, astronomy, anatomy, physiology, etc., attained considerable
development. China also been began development in natural sciences in the third century
B.C.E.

The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production
of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things
produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared
in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes
or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products
are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and
political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in men's better insights
into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange.
They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular
epoch. The growing perception that existing social institutions are unreasonable and
unjust, that reason has become unreason, and right wrong 1), is only proof that in
the modes of production and exchange changes have silently taken place with which
the social order, adapted to earlier economic conditions, is no longer in keeping.
From this it also follows that the means of getting rid of the incongruities that
have been brought to light must also be present, in a more or less developed condition,
within the changed modes of production themselves. These means are not to be invented
by deduction from fundamental principles, but are to be discovered in the stubborn
facts of the existing system of production.

What is, then, the position of modern Socialism in this connection?

The present situation of society — this is now pretty generally conceded — is the
creation of the ruling class of today, of the bourgeoisie. The mode of production
peculiar to the bourgeoisie, known, since Marx, as the capitalist mode of production,
was incompatible with the feudal system, with the privileges it conferred upon individuals,
entire social ranks and local corporations, as well as with the hereditary ties of
subordination which constituted the framework of its social organization. The bourgeoisie
broke up the feudal system and built upon its ruins the capitalist order of society,
the kingdom of free competition, of personal liberty, of the equality, before the
law, of all commodity owners, of all the rest of the capitalist blessings. Thenceforward,
the capitalist mode of production could develop in freedom. Since steam, machinery,
and the making of machines by machinery transformed the older manufacture into modern
industry, the productive forces, evolved under the guidance of the bourgeoisie, developed
with a rapidity and in a degree unheard of before. But just as the older manufacture,
in its time, and handicraft, becoming more developed under its influence, had come
into collision with the feudal trammels of the guilds, so now modern industry, in
its complete development, comes into collision with the bounds within which the capitalist
mode of production holds it confined. The new productive forces have already outgrown
the capitalistic mode of using them. And this conflict between productive forces and
modes of production is not a conflict engendered in the mind of man, like that between
original sin and divine justice. It exists, in fact, objectively, outside us, independently
of the will and actions even of the men that have brought it on. Modern Socialism
is nothing but the reflex, in thought, of this conflict in fact; its ideal reflection
in the minds, first, of the class directly suffering under it, the working class.

Now, in what does this conflict consist?

Before capitalist production — i.e., in the Middle Ages — the system of petty industry
obtained generally, based upon the private property of the laborers in their means
of production; in the country, the agriculture of the small peasant, freeman, or serf;
in the towns, the handicrafts organized in guilds. The instruments of labor — land,
agricultural implements, the workshop, the tool — were the instruments of labor of
single individuals, adapted for the use of one worker, and, therefore, of necessity,
small, dwarfish, circumscribed. But, for this very reason, they belonged as a rule
to the producer himself. To concentrate these scattered, limited means of production,
to enlarge them, to turn them into the powerful levers of production of the present
day — this was precisely the historic role of capitalist production and of its upholder,
the bourgeoisie. In the fourth section of Capital, Marx has explained in detail how
since the 15th century this has been historically worked out through the three phases
of simple co-operation, manufacture, and modern industry. But the bourgeoisie, as
is shown there, could not transform these puny means of production into mighty productive
forces without transforming them, at the same time, from means of production of the
individual into social means of production only workable by a collectivity of men.
The spinning wheel, the handloom, the blacksmith's hammer, were replaced by the spinning-machine,
the power-loom, the steam-hammer; the individual workshop, by the factory implying
the co-operation of hundreds and thousands of workmen. In like manner, production
itself changed from a series of individual into a series of social acts, and the production
from individual to social products. The yarn, the cloth, the metal articles that now
come out of the factory were the joint product of many workers, through whose hands
they had successively to pass before they were ready. No one person could say of them:
"I made that; this is my product."

But where, in a given society, the fundamental form of production is that spontaneous
division of labor which creeps in gradually and not upon any preconceived plan, there
the products take on the form of commodities, whose mutual exchange, buying and selling,
enable the individual producers to satisfy their manifold wants. And this was the
case in the Middle Ages. The peasant, e.g., sold to the artisan agricultural products
and bought from him the products of handicraft. Into this society of individual producers,
of commodity producers, the new mode of production thrust itself. In the midst of
the old division of labor, grown up spontaneously and upon no definite plan, which
had governed the whole of society, now arose division of labor upon a definite plan,
as organized in the factory; side by side with individual production appeared social
production. The products of both were sold in the same market, and, therefore, at
prices at least approximately equal. But organization upon a definite plan was stronger
than spontaneous division of labor. The factories working with the combined social
forces of a collectivity of individuals produced their commodities far more cheaply
than the individual small producers. Individual producers succumbed in one department
after another. Socialized production revolutionized all the old methods of production.
But its revolutionary character was, at the same time, so little recognized that it
was, on the contrary, introduced as a means of increasing and developing the production
of commodities. When it arose, it found ready-made, and made liberal use of, certain
machinery for the production and exchange of commodities: merchants' capital, handicraft,
wage-labor. Socialized production thus introducing itself as a new form of the production
of commodities, it was a matter of course that under it the old forms of appropriation
remained in full swing, and were applied to its products as well.

In the medieval stage of evolution of the production of commodities, the question
as to the owner of the product of labor could not arise. The individual producer,
as a rule, had, from raw material belonging to himself, and generally his own handiwork,
produced it with his own tools, by the labor of his own hands or of his family. There
was no need for him to appropriate the new product. It belonged wholly to him, as
a matter of course. His property in the product was, therefore, based upon his own
labor. Even where external help was used, this was, as a rule, of little importance,
and very generally was compensated by something other than wages. The apprentices
and journeymen of the guilds worked less for board and wages than for education, in
order that they might become master craftsmen themselves.

Then came the concentration of the means of production and of the producers in large
workshops and manufactories, their transformation into actual socialized means of
production and socialized producers. But the socialized producers and means of production
and their products were still treated, after this change, just as they had been before
— i.e., as the means of production and the products of individuals. Hitherto, the
owner of the instruments of labor had himself appropriated the product, because, as
a rule, it was his own product and the assistance of others was the exception. Now,
the owner of the instruments of labor always appropriated to himself the product,
although it was no longer his product but exclusively the product of the labor of
others. Thus, the products now produced socially were not appropriated by those who
had actually set in motion the means of production and actually produced the commodities,
but by the capitalists. The means of production, and production itself, had become
in essence socialized. But they were subjected to a form of appropriation which presupposes
the private production of individuals, under which, therefore, every one owns his
own product and brings it to market. The mode of production is subjected to this form
of appropriation, although it abolishes the conditions upon which the latter rests.
[2]

This contradiction, which gives to the new mode of production its capitalistic character,
contains the germ of the whole of the social antagonisms of today. The greater the
mastery obtained by the new mode of production over all important fields of production
and in all manufacturing countries, the more it reduced individual production to an
insignificant residuum, the more clearly was brought out the incompatibility of socialized
production with capitalistic appropriation.

The first capitalists found, as we have said, alongside of other forms of labor, wage-labor
ready-made for them on the market. But it was exceptional, complementary, accessory,
transitory wage-labor. The agricultural laborer, though, upon occasion, he hired himself
out by the day, had a few acres of his own land on which he could at all events live
at a pinch. The guilds were so organized that the journeyman to today became the master
of tomorrow. But all this changed, as soon as the means of production became socialized
and concentrated in the hands of capitalists. The means of production, as well as
the product, of the individual producer became more and more worthless; there was
nothing left for him but to turn wage-worker under the capitalist. Wage-labor, aforetime
the exception and accessory, now became the rule and basis of all production; aforetime
complementary, it now became the sole remaining function of the worker. The wage-worker
for a time became a wage-worker for life. The number of these permanent was further
enormously increased by the breaking-up of the feudal system that occurred at the
same time, by the disbanding of the retainers of the feudal lords, the eviction of
the peasants from their homesteads, etc. The separation was made complete between
the means of production concentrated in the hands of the capitalists, on the one side,
and the producers, possessing nothing but their labor-power, on the other. The contradiction
between socialized production and capitalistic appropriation manifested itself as
the antagonism of proletariat and bourgeoisie.

We have seen that the capitalistic mode of production thrust its way into a society
of commodity-producers, of individual producers, whose social bond was the exchange
of their products. But every society based upon the production of commodities has
this peculiarity: that the producers have lost control over their own social inter-relations.
Each man produces for himself with such means of production as he may happen to have,
and for such exchange as he may require to satisfy his remaining wants. No one knows
how much of his particular article is coming on the market, nor how much of it will
be wanted. No one knows whether his individual product will meet an actual demand,
whether he will be able to make good his costs of production or even to sell his commodity
at all. Anarchy reigns in socialized production.

But the production of commodities, like every other form of production, has it peculiar,
inherent laws inseparable from it; and these laws work, despite anarchy, in and through
anarchy. They reveal themselves in the only persistent form of social inter-relations
— i.e., in exchange — and here they affect the individual producers as compulsory
laws of competition. They are, at first, unknown to these producers themselves, and
have to be discovered by them gradually and as the result of experience. They work
themselves out, therefore, independently of the producers, and in antagonism to them,
as inexorable natural laws of their particular form of production. The product governs
the producers.

In mediaeval society, especially in the earlier centuries, production was essentially
directed toward satisfying the wants of the individual. It satisfied, in the main,
only the wants of the producer and his family. Where relations of personal dependence
existed, as in the country, it also helped to satisfy the wants of the feudal lord.
In all this there was, therefore, no exchange; the products, consequently, did not
assume the character of commodities. The family of the peasant produced almost everything
they wanted: clothes and furniture, as well as the means of subsistence. Only when
it began to produce more than was sufficient to supply its own wants and the payments
in kind to the feudal lords, only then did it also produce commodities. This surplus,
thrown into socialized exchange and offered for sale, became commodities.

The artisan in the towns, it is true, had from the first to produce for exchange.
But they, also, themselves supplied the greatest part of their individual wants. They
had gardens and plots of land. They turned their cattle out into the communal forest,
which, also, yielded them timber and firing. The women spun flax, wool, and so forth.
Production for the purpose of exchange, production of commodities, was only in its
infancy. Hence, exchange was restricted, the market narrow, the methods of production
stable; there was local exclusiveness without, local unity within; the mark in the
country; in the town, the guild.

But with the extension of the production of commodities, and especially with the introduction
of the capitalist mode of production, the laws of commodity-production, hitherto latent,
came into action more openly and with greater force. The old bonds were loosened,
the old exclusive limits broken through, the producers were more and more turned into
independent, isolated producers of commodities. It became apparent that the production
of society at large was ruled by absence of plan, by accident, by anarchy; and this
anarchy grew to greater and greater height. But the chief means by aid of which the
capitalist mode of production intensified this anarchy of socialized production was
the exact opposite of anarchy. It was the increasing organization of production, upon
a social basis, in every individual productive establishment. By this, the old, peaceful,
stable condition of things was ended. Wherever this organization of production was
introduced into a branch of industry, it brooked no other method of production by
its side. The field of labor became a battle-ground. The great geographical discoveries,
and the colonization following them, multiplied markets and quickened the transformation
of handicraft into manufacture. The war did not simply break out between the individual
producers of particular localities. The local struggles begat, in their turn, national
conflicts, the commercial wars of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Finally, modern industry and the opening of the world-market made the struggle universal,
and at the same time gave it an unheard-of virulence. Advantages in natural or artificial
conditions of production now decide the existence or non-existence of individual capitalists,
as well as of whole industries and countries. He that falls is remorselessly cast
aside. It is the Darwinian struggle of the individual for existence transferred from
Nature to society with intensified violence. The conditions of existence natural to
the animal appear as the final term of human development. The contradiction between
socialized production and capitalistic appropriation now presents itself as an antagonism
between the organization of production in the individual workshop and the anarchy
of production in society generally.

The capitalistic mode of production moves in these two forms of the antagonism immanent
to it from its very origin. It is never able to get out of that "vicious circle" which
Fourier had already discovered. What Fourier could not, indeed, see in his time is
that this circle is gradually narrowing; that the movement becomes more and more a
spiral, and must come to an end, like the movement of planets, by collision with the
centre. It is the compelling force of anarchy in the production of society at large
that more and more completely turns the great majority of men into proletarians; and
it is the masses of the proletariat again who will finally put an end to anarchy in
production. It is the compelling force of anarchy in social production that turns
the limitless perfectibility of machinery under modern industry into a compulsory
law by which every individual industrial capitalist must perfect his machinery more
and more, under penalty of ruin.

But the perfecting of machinery is making human labor superfluous. If the introduction
and increase of machinery means the displacement of millions of manual by a few machine-workers,
improvement in machinery means the displacement of more and more of the machine-workers
themselves. It means, in the last instance, the production of a number of available
wage workers in excess of the average needs of capital, the formation of a complete
industrial reserve army, as I called it in 1845 [3], available at the times when industry
is working at high pressure, to be cast out upon the street when the inevitable crash
comes, a constant dead weight upon the limbs of the working-class in its struggle
for existence with capital, a regulator for keeping of wages down to the low level
that suits the interests of capital.

Thus it comes about, to quote Marx, that machinery becomes the most powerful weapon
in the war of capital against the working-class; that the instruments of labor constantly
tear the means of subsistence out of the hands of the laborer; that they very product
of the worker is turned into an instrument for his subjugation.

Thus it comes about that the economizing of the instruments of labor becomes at the
same time, from the outset, the most reckless waste of labor-power, and robbery based
upon the normal conditions under which labor functions; that machinery,

"the most powerful instrument for shortening labor time, becomes the most unfailing
means for placing every moment of the laborer's time and that of his family at the
disposal of the capitalist for the purpose of expanding the value of his capital."
(Capital, English edition, p. 406)

Thus it comes about that the overwork of some becomes the preliminary condition for
the idleness of others, and that modern industry, which hunts after new consumers
over the whole world, forces the consumption of the masses at home down to a starvation
minimum, and in doing thus destroys its own home market.

"The law that always equilibrates the relative surplus- population, or industrial
reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the laborer
to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes
an accumulation of misery, corresponding with the accumulation of capital. Accumulation
of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony
of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole,
i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital
(Marx's Capital, p. 661)

And to expect any other division of the products from the capitalist mode of production
is the same as expecting the electrodes of a battery not to decompose acidulated water,
not to liberate oxygen at the positive, hydrogen at the negative pole, so long as
they are connected with they battery.

We have seen that the ever-increasing perfectibility of modern machinery is, by the
anarchy of social production, turned into a compulsory law that forces the individual
industrial capitalist always to improve his machinery, always to increase its productive
force. The bare possibility of extending the field of production is transformed for
him into a similarly compulsory law. The enormous expansive force of modern industry,
compared with which that of gases is mere child's play, appears to us now as a necessity
for expansion, both qualitative and quantative, that laughs at all resistance. Such
resistance is offered by consumption, by sales, by the markets for the products of
modern industry. But the capacity for extension, extensive and intensive, of the markets
is primarily governed by quite different laws that work much less energetically. The
extension of the markets cannot keep pace with the extension of production. The collision
becomes inevitable, and as this cannot produce any real solution so long as it does
not break in pieces the capitalist mode of production, the collisions become periodic.
Capitalist production has begotten another "vicious circle".

As a matter of fact, since 1825, when the first general crisis broke out, the whole
industrial and commercial world, production and exchange among all civilized peoples
and their more or less barbaric hangers-on, are thrown out of joint about once every
10 years. Commerce is at a stand-still, the markets are glutted, products accumulate,
as multitudinous as they are unsaleable, hard cash disappears, credit vanishes, factories
are closed, the mass of the workers are in want of the means of subsistence, because
they have produced too much of the means of subsistence; bankruptcy follows upon bankruptcy,
execution upon execution. The stagnation last for years; productive forces and products
are wasted and destroyed wholesale, until the accumulated mass of commodities finally
filter off, more or less depreciated in value, until production and exchange gradually
begin to move again. Little by little, the pace quickens. It becomes a trot. The industrial
trot breaks into a canter, the canter in turn grows into the headlong gallop of a
perfect steeplechase of industry, commercial credit, and speculation, which finally,
after breakneck leaps, ends where it began — in the ditch of a crisis. And so over
and over again. We have now, since the year 1825, gone through this five times, and
at the present moment (1877), we are going through it for the sixth time. And the
character of these crises is so clearly defined that Fourier hit all of them off when
he described the first "crise plethorique", a crisis from plethora.

In these crises, the contradiction between socialized production and capitalist appropriation
ends in a violent explosion. The circulation of commodities is, for the time being,
stopped. Money, the means of circulation, becomes a hindrance to circulation. All
the laws of production and circulation of commodities are turned upside down. The
economic collision has reached its apogee. The mode of production is in rebellion
against the mode of exchange.

The fact that the socialized organization of production within the factory has developed
so far that it has become incompatible with the anarchy of production in society,
which exists side by side with and dominates it, is brought home to the capitalist
themselves by the violent concentration of capital that occurs during crises, through
the ruin of many large, and a still greater number of small, capitalists. The whole
mechanism of the capitalist mode of production breaks down under the pressure of the
productive forces, its own creations. It is no longer able to turn all this mass of
means of production into capital. They lie fallow, and for that very reason the industrial
reserve army must also lie fallow. Means of production, means of subsistence, available
laborers, all the elements of production and of general wealth, are present in abundance.
But "abundance becomes the source of distress and want" (Fourier), because it is the
very thing that prevents the transformation of the means of production and subsistence
into capital. For in capitalistic society, the means of production can only function
when they have undergone a preliminary transformation into capital, into the means
of exploiting human labor-power. The necessity of this transformation into capital
of the means of production and subsistence stands like a ghost between these and the
workers. It alone prevents the coming together of the material and personal levers
of production; it alone forbids the means of production to function, the workers to
work and live. On the one hand, therefore, the capitalistic mode of production stands
convicted of its own incapacity to further direct these productive forces. On the
other, these productive forces themselves, with increasing energy, press forward to
the removal of the existing contradiction, to the abolition of their quality as capital,
to the practical recognition of their character as social production forces.

This rebellion of the productive forces, as they grow more and more powerful, against
their quality as capital, this stronger and stronger command that their social character
shall be recognized, forces the capital class itself to treat them more and more as
social productive forces, so far as this is possible under capitalist conditions.
The period of industrial high pressure, with its unbounded inflation of credit, not
less than the crash itself, by the collapse of great capitalist establishments, tends
to bring about that form of the socialization of great masses of the means of production
which we meet with in the different kinds of joint-stock companies. Many of these
means of production and of distribution are, from the outset, so colossal that, like
the railways, they exclude all other forms of capitalistic expansion. At a further
stage of evolution, this form also becomes insufficient. The producers on a large
scale in a particular branch of an industry in a particular country unite in a "Trust",
a union for the purpose of regulating production. They determine the total amount
to be produced, parcel it out among themselves, and thus enforce the selling price
fixed beforehand. But trusts of this kind, as soon as business becomes bad, are generally
liable to break up, and on this very account compel a yet greater concentration of
association. The whole of a particular industry is turned into one gigantic joint-stock
company; internal competition gives place to the internal monopoly of this one company.
This has happened in 1890 with the English alkali production, which is now, after
the fusion of 48 large works, in the hands of one company, conducted upon a single
plan, and with a capital of 6,000,000 pounds.

In the trusts, freedom of competition changes into its very opposite — into monopoly;
and the production without any definite plan of capitalistic society capitulates to
the production upon a definite plan of the invading socialistic society. Certainly,
this is so far still to the benefit and advantage of the capitalists. But, in this
case, the exploitation is so palpable, that it must break down. No nation will put
up with production conducted by trusts, with so barefaced an exploitation of the community
by a small band of dividend-mongers.

In any case, with trusts or without, the official representative of capitalist society
— the state — will ultimately have to undertake the direction of production. [4] This
necessity for conversion into State property is felt first in the great institutions
for intercourse and communication — the post office, the telegraphs, the railways.

If the crises demonstrate the incapacity of the bourgeoisie for managing any longer
modern productive forces, the transformation of the great establishments for production
and distribution into joint-stock companies, trusts, and State property, show how
unnecessary the bourgeoisie are for that purpose. All the social functions of the
capitalist has no further social function than that of pocketing dividends, tearing
off coupons, and gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists despoil
one another of their capital. At first, the capitalistic mode of production forces
out the workers. Now, it forces out the capitalists, and reduces them, just as it
reduced the workers, to the ranks of the surplus-population, although not immediately
into those of the industrial reserve army.

But, the transformation — either into joint-stock companies and trusts, or into State-ownership
— does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock
companies and trusts, this is obvious. And the modern State, again, is only the organization
that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the
capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as
of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially
a capitalist machine — the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of
the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive
forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens
does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation
is not done away with. It is, rather, brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it
topples over. State-ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the
conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements
of that solution.

This solution can only consist in the practical recognition of the social nature of
the modern forces of production, and therefore in the harmonizing with the socialized
character of the means of production. And this can only come about by society openly
and directly taking possession of the productive forces which have outgrown all control,
except that of society as a whole. The social character of the means of production
and of the products today reacts against the producers, periodically disrupts all
production and exchange, acts only like a law of Nature working blindly, forcibly,
destructively. But,with the taking over by society of the productive forces, the social
character of the means of production and of the products will be utilized by the producers
with a perfect understanding of its nature, and instead of being a source of disturbance
and periodical collapse, will become the most powerful lever of production itself.

Active social forces work exactly like natural forces: blindly, forcibly, destructively,
so long as we do not understand, and reckon with, them. But, when once we understand
them, when once we grasp their action, their direction, their effects, it depends
only upon ourselves to subject them more and more to our own will, and, by means of
them, to reach our own ends. And this holds quite especially of the mighty productive
forces of today. As long as we obstinately refuse to understand the nature and the
character of these social means of action — and this understanding goes against the
grain of the capitalist mode of production, and its defenders — so long these forces
are at work in spite of us, in opposition to us, so long they master us, as we have
shown above in detail.

But when once their nature is understood, they can, in the hand working together,
be transformed from master demons into willing servants. The difference is as that
between the destructive force of electricity in the lightning in the storm, and electricity
under command in the telegraph and the voltaic arc; the difference between a conflagration,
and fire working in the service of man. With this recognition, at last, of the real
nature of the productive forces of today, the social anarchy of production gives place
to a social regulation of production upon a definite plan, according to the needs
of the community and of each individual. Then the capitalist mode of appropriation,
in which the product enslaves first the producer, and then the appropriator, is replaced
by the mode of appropriation of the products that is based upon the nature of the
modern means of production; upon the one hand, direct social appropriation, as means
to the maintenance and extension of production — on the other, direct individual appropriation,
as means of subsistence and of enjoyment.

Whilst the capitalist mode of production more and more completely transforms the great
majority of the population into proletarians, it creates the power which, under penalty
of its own destruction, is forced to accomplish this revolution. Whilst it forces
on more and more of the transformation of the vast means of production, already socialized,
into State property, it shows itself the way to accomplishing this revolution. The
proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into State property.

But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinction
and class antagonisms, abolishes also the State as State. Society, thus far, based
upon class antagonisms, had need of the State. That is, of an organization of the
particular class which was, pro tempore, the exploiting class, an organization for
the purpose of preventing any interference from without with the existing conditions
of production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the
exploited classes in the condition of oppression corresponding with the given mode
of production (slavery, serfdom, wage-labor). The State was the official representative
of society as a whole; the gathering of it together into a visible embodiment. But,
it was this only in so far as it was the State of that class which itself represented,
for the time being, society as a whole:

in ancient times, the State of slaveowning citizens;

in the Middle Ages, the feudal lords;

in our own times, the bourgeoisie.

When, at last, it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders
itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection;
as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present
anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed,
nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is
no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes
itself the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means
of production in the name of society — this is, at the same time, its last independent
act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after
another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced
by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The
State is not "abolished". It dies out. This gives the measure of the value of the
phrase: "a free State", both as to its justifiable use at times by agitators, and
as to its ultimate scientific inefficiency; and also of the demands of the so-called
anarchists for the abolition of the State out of hand.

Since the historical appearance of the capitalist mode of production, the appropriation
by society of all the means of production has often been dreamed of, more or less
vaguely, by individuals, as well as by sects, as the ideal of the future. But it could
become possible, could become a historical necessity, only when the actual conditions
for its realization were there. Like every other social advance, it becomes practicable,
not by men understanding that the existence of classes is in contradiction to justice,
equality, etc., not by the mere willingness to abolish these classes, but by virtue
of certain new economic conditions. The separation of society into an exploiting and
an exploited class, a ruling and an oppressed class, was the necessary consequences
of the deficient and restricted development of production in former times. So long
as the total social labor only yields a produce which but slightly exceeds that barely
necessary for the existence of all; so long, therefore, as labor engages all or almost
all the time of the great majority of the members of society — so long, of necessity,
this society is divided into classes. Side by side with the great majority, exclusively
bond slaves to labor, arises a class freed from directly productive labor, which looks
after the general affairs of society: the direction of labor, State business, law,
science, art, etc. It is, therefore, the law of division of labor that lies at the
basis of the division into classes. But this does not prevent this division into classes
from being carried out by means of violence and robbery, trickery and fraud. it does
not prevent the ruling class, once having the upper hand, from consolidating its power
at the expense of the working-class, from turning its social leadership into an intensified
exploitation of the masses.

But if, upon this showing, division into classes has a certain historical justification,
it has this only for a given period, only under given social conditions. It was based
upon the insufficiency of production. It will be swept away by the complete development
of modern productive forces. And, in fact, the abolition of classes in society presupposes
a degree of historical evolution at which the existence, not simply of this or that
particular ruling class, but of any ruling class at all, and, therefore, the existence
of class distinction itself, has become a obsolete anachronism. It presupposes, therefore,
the development of production carried out to a degree at which appropriation of the
means of production and of the products, and, with this, of political domination,
of the monopoly of culture, and of intellectual leadership by a particular class of
society, has become not only superfluous but economically, politically, intellectually,
a hindrance to development.

This point is now reached. Their political and intellectual bankruptcy is scarcely
any longer a secret to the bourgeoisie themselves. Their economic bankruptcy recurs
regularly every 10 years. In every crisis, society is suffocated beneath the weight
of its own productive forces and products, which it cannot use, and stands helpless,
face-to-face with the absurd contradiction that the producers have nothing to consume,
because consumers are wanting. The expansive force of the means of production burst
the bonds that the capitalist mode of production had imposed upon them. Their deliverance
from these bonds is the one precondition for an unbroken, constantly-accelerated development
of the productive forces, and therewith for a practically unlimited increase of production
itself. Nor is this all. The socialized appropriation of the means of production does
away, not only with the present artificial restrictions upon production, but also
with the positive waste and devastation of productive forces and products that are
at the present time the inevitable concomitants of production, and that reach their
height in the crises. Further, it sets free for the community at large a mass of means
of production and of products, by doing away with the senseless extravagance of the
ruling classes of today, and their political representatives. The possibility of securing
for every member of society, by means of socialized production, an existence not only
fully sufficient materially, and becoming day-by-day more full, but an existence guaranteeing
to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties —
this possibility is now, for the first time, here, but it is here. [5]

With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities
is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer.
Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organization. The
struggle for individual existence disappears. Then, for the first time, man, in a
certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges
from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere
of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now
comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real,
conscious lord of nature, because he has now become master of his own social organization.
The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face-to-face with man as laws
of Nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding,
and so mastered by him. Man's own social organization, hitherto confronting him as
a necessity imposed by Nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free
action. The extraneous objective forces that have, hitherto, governed history,pass
under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, more and more
consciously, make his own history — only from that time will the social causes set
in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results
intended by him. It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom
of freedom.

Let us briefly sum up our sketch of historical evolution.

I. Mediaeval Society — Individual production on a small scale. Means of production
adapted for individual use; hence primitive, ungainly, petty, dwarfed in action. Production
for immediate consumption, either of the producer himself or his feudal lord. Only
where an excess of production over this consumption occurs is such excess offered
for sale, enters into exchange. Production of commodities, therefore, only in its
infancy. But already it contains within itself, in embryo, anarchy in the production
of society at large.

II. Capitalist Revolution — transformation of industry, at first be means of simple
cooperation and manufacture. Concentration of the means of production, hitherto scattered,
into great workshops. As a consequence, their transformation from individual to social
means of production — a transformation which does not, on the whole, affect the form
of exchange. The old forms of appropriation remain in force. The capitalist appears.
In his capacity as owner of the means of production, he also appropriates the products
and turns them into commodities. Production has become a social act. Exchange and
appropriation continue to be individual acts, the acts of individuals. The social
product is appropriated by the individual capitalist. Fundamental contradiction, whence
arise all the contradictions in which our present-day society moves, and which modern
industry brings to light.

A. Severance of the producer from the means of production. Condemnation of the worker
to wage-labor for life. Antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

B. Growing predominance and increasing effectiveness of the laws governing the production
of commodities. Unbridled competition. Contradiction between socialized organization
in the individual factory and social anarchy in the production as a whole.

C. On the one hand, perfecting of machinery, made by competition compulsory for each
individual manufacturer, and complemented by a constantly growing displacement of
laborers. Industrial reserve-army. On the other hand, unlimited extension of production,
also compulsory under competition, for every manufacturer. On both sides, unheard-of
development of productive forces, excess of supply over demand, over-production and
products — excess there, of laborers, without employment and without means of existence.
But these two levers of production and of social well-being are unable to work together,
because the capitalist form of production prevents the productive forces from working
and the products from circulating, unless they are first turned into capital — which
their very superabundance prevents. The contradiction has grown into an absurdity.
The mode of production rises in rebellion against the form of exchange.

D. Partial recognition of the social character of the productive forces forced upon
the capitalists themselves. Taking over of the great institutions for production and
communication, first by joint-stock companies, later in by trusts, then by the State.
The bourgeoisie demonstrated to be a superfluous class. All its social functions are
now performed by salaried employees.

III. Proletarian Revolution — Solution of the contradictions. The proletariat seizes
the public power, and by means of this transforms the socialized means of production,
slipping from the hands of the bourgeoisie, into public property. By this act, the
proletariat frees the means of production from the character of capital they have
thus far borne, and gives their socialized character complete freedom to work itself
out. Socialized production upon a predetermined plan becomes henceforth possible.
The development of production makes the existence of different classes of society
thenceforth an anachronism. In proportion as anarchy in social production vanishes,
the political authority of the State dies out. Man, at last the master of his own
form of social organization, becomes at the same time the lord over Nature, his own
master — free. To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the
modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and this the
very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed proletarian class a full knowledge
of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish,
this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific
Socialism.

Footnotes

(1 Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust

[2] It is hardly necessary in this connection to point out that, even if the form
of appropriation remains the same, the character of the appropriation is just as much
revolutionized as production is by the changes described above. It is, of course,
a very different matter whether I appropriate to myself my own product or that of
another. Note in passing that wage-labor, which contains the whole capitalist mode
of production in embryo, is very ancient; in a sporadic, scattered form, it existed
for centuries alongside slave-labor. But the embryo could duly develop into the capitalistic
mode of production only when the necessary historical pre-conditions had been furnished.

[3] "The Conditions of the Working-Class in England" — Sonnenschein & Co., p.84.

[4] I say "have to". For only when the means of production and distribution have _actually_
outgrown the form of management by joint-stock companies, and when, therefore, the
taking them over by the State has become _economically_ inevitable, only then — even
if it is the State of today that effects this — is there an economic advance, the
attainment of another step preliminary to the taking over of all productive forces
by society itself. But of late, since Bismarck went in for State-ownership of industrial
establishments, a kind of spurious Socialism has arisen, degenerating, now and again,
into something of flunkyism, that without more ado declares all State-ownership, even
of the Bismarkian sort, to be socialistic. Certainly, if the taking over by the State
of the tobacco industry is socialistic, then Napoleon and Metternich must be numbered
among the founders of Socialism. If the Belgian State, for quite ordinary political and financial reasons, itself
constructed its chief railway lines; if Bismarck, not under any economic compulsion,
took over for the State the chief Prussian lines, simply to be the better able to
have them in hand in case of war, to bring up the railway employees as voting cattle
for the Government, and especially to create for himself a new source of income independent
of parliamentary votes — this was, in no sense, a socialistic measure, directly or
indirectly, consciously or unconsciously. Otherwise, the Royal Maritime Company, the
Royal porcelain manufacture, and even the regimental tailor of the army would also
be socialistic institutions, or even, as was seriously proposed by a sly dog in Frederick
William III's reign, the taking over by the State of the brothels.

[5] A few figures may serve to give an approximate idea of the enormous expansive
force of the modern means of production, even under capitalist pressure. According
to Mr. Giffen, the total wealth of Great Britain and Ireland amounted, in round numbers
in 1814 to £ 2,200,000,000, 1865 to £ 6,100,000,000, 1875 to £ 8,500,000,000. As an instance of the squandering of means of production and of products during a
crisis, the total loss in the German iron industry alone, in the crisis of 1873-78,
was given at the second German Industrial Congress (Berlin, February 21, 1878), as
22,750,000 pounds.